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18 November 2015

Dead Pet Poems: Andrew Hudgins and the Dangers of the Sentimental

Sarah Freligh

PQ Contributing Editor

The first
poems I wrote were about my cats, a pair of crabby old ladies who died within
months of each other at the venerable age of eighteen. I was operating on
Hemingway’s dictum to “write what you know,” and what I knew at the time was
cats and death. What I didn’t know was how easy it is—when writing about the
deaths of pets—to veer into sentimentality, the dangerous territory that lurks
just beyond real emotion.Not
surprisingly, my dead cat poems were labeled “too sentimental” by the editors
who promptly sent them back. One editor, in fact, included a terse
sympathy/rejection note: “I’m sorry your cat died, but I don’t want to read a
poem about it.”

So is it
possible to write poems about dead pets without veering into the sentimental? In
“‘My Only Swerving’: Sentimentality in Contemporary Poetry,” Andrew Hudgins wades
into this dilemma by surveying some contemporary examples of dead animal poems and
concluding: 1) Without wit and irony, a dead animal poem typically veers into
the sentimental; and 2) Perhaps the non-ironic works only when a fairly large
(human-sized) animal is involved, as in William Stafford’s “Traveling in the
Dark,” a poem that “owes much of its success to Stafford’s exquisite awareness
of the significance of the dead deer he finds beside the road.”

Hudgins grapples
with this conundrum in “Sentimental Dangers,” a poem from his debut collection,
Saints and Strangers. The speaker in
the book’s first section is that of “a person who writes of himself and whose
concerns are disturbing and profound,” “disturbing” largely owing to subjects
that range from the bodies of rape victims found in the woods or hunters
butchering a doe hanging from a child’s swing set.In contrast, “Sentimental Dangers” is
striking in its reflective understatement, a device that allows the speaker,
and the poem, to avoid the dangers inherent in the subject matter.

The poem
recounts a troubling time in the speaker’s past: He is unemployed— “fierce with
self-pity”—and his marriage is failing. He comes home one day to find his wife
tossing a stick to a stray dog, an “ugly dog” who starts hanging around,
eventually becoming the speaker’s confidant:

I’d sit outside all afternoon and talk

to him, to the hard knowledge in his face

that she’d leave me when I was well enough

to be left. I talked too much.

In
subsequent lines, the speaker reveals his wife’s alarm over his preoccupation
with the dog and his unemployment:

She’d tell her friends,

He’s out of
work. He thinks he is that dog.

And she was right, I did.

Poverty and
circumstance compel the speaker to take the dog to the pound where he consigns
him (most likely) to a sure death. Yet even as the speaker “signed him away
with my right hand,” the dog demonstrates his continued and unabashed affection
for the speaker by licking his left hand, prompting him to feel as if “I was
signing myself away. / An illusion sure, but one that lasted months.”

This is
subject matter that in other hands could turn sentimental. Hudgins, however,
avoids the “dangers” alluded to in the title by deft use of point of view,
specifically the vantage point of the speaker. The humorous yet poignant tone
conveyed by the speaker’s voice suggests that there is enough temporal distance
between the events of the poem and the “narrative now” of the speaker for him
to reflect on the past without acrimony or melodrama. It’s a conversational,
mostly matter-of-fact tone, established and modulated by loose iambic
pentameter lines. Consider the first three lines:

When out of work and fierce with self-pity,

I’d walk until the fierceness left my feet

and I broke down. Then I’d start home

While the
first line follows an iambic meter through four feet, the fifth is a
trochee—PI-ty—so that the box-carred stresses of “SELF PI-ty” call attention to
themselves—much as the moping, self-pitying person will.The second line eases into a conversational
iambic pentameter, while the third line once again breaks the rhythm and calls
attention to the stressed syllables of “broke down” and “start home.”

The first
several lines quickly establish one of the poem’s conflicts, the “essential
ingredient of story,” according to Gregory Orr in “Four Temperaments and the
Forms of Poetry.” The speaker’s self-pity, a result of being out of work, leads
to his alliance with the dog, with whom he identifies, and ultimately
complicates his relationship with his wife. The resolution, then, is to take
the dog to the pound.

While the
poem’s structure mimics the classic Aristotelian story model, it can also be
viewed as a series of connections and disconnections between the poem’s
characters, a pattern that’s necessary if a story is to be a “source of meaning
and significance,” according to Janet Burroway. The speaker’s disconnection
from employment leads him to connect with/complain to the dog and further
disconnect from his wife. By disconnecting from the dog at the poem’s end, the
implication is that perhaps now he’ll re-connect with his wife. And yet it’s
the dog, and not his wife, that he’s recalling in the shift to the “narrative
now”—the “today” in the last lines of the poem:

I
thought of this today when I crossed the bridge

and the river smelled like a wet, unwanted
dog.

Though the
voice remains low-key and matter-of-fact, the consonance of those repeated “w”
sounds in “wet, unwanted” echo the mouth sounds of a baby’s cry (wah), hinting perhaps at an unspoken
sorrow. That the dog is brought in peripherally, through a remembered smell, is
heartbreaking in its understatement, its suggestion of regret. In doing so,
Hudgins acknowledges the dog’s significance, but—like Stafford—does not
sentimentalize it, ultimately avoiding the pitfalls of the dead pet poem.